Could Cisco and BMC become more than partners?

As Cisco makes an aggressive play for datacenter market share with its California blade server, industry watchers speculate whether the vendor might also consider acquiring one of the big four management software makers to strike a potentially bigger blow to competitors HP and IBM.

Cisco's decision to incorporate BMC's management and automation technologies into its Unified Computer System (UCS) strategy has industry watchers thinking Cisco might be the vendor to displace one of the long-running management market leaders. BMC, CA, HP, and IBM earned the moniker "big four" years ago and have all have managed to maintain their market dominance. Yet advanced datacenter technologies such as virtualization are driving the need for more control, management, and automation technologies in enterprise IT departments -- something Cisco seemed to realize when it decided to partner with BMC, among several other vendors, with its latest datacenter play.

[ Some Cisco competitors have been  downplaying news of its blade server, but HP has traded jabs with Cisco over virtualization bragging rights. | Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. ]

"I could be wrong, but I'm thinking there will be no hardware-only computing vendors by the end of this recession. The perceived customer value for hardware-only is too low and therefore margins are too low," says Jasmine Noel, co-founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "For customers with large data centers and server farms, the perceived value is having agile, policy-based computing and capacity management. Cisco, using next-generation Intel chips, could by itself deliver the first two parts, but not the management system."

With BMC, Cisco adds platform-agnostic management and automation technology. Competitors HP and IBM, despite managing heterogeneous systems, also sell servers, which analysts say could appear to bias their software toward their own gear. Also HP's recent datacenter overhaul pitch suggested customer also "rip and replace" their existing hardware to support HP's vision of an advanced environment.